New chapbook: Flowers Around Your Soft Throat

I am thrilled to announce that Structo‘s first poetry chapbook is now available. Christina Seymour’s collection Flowers Around Your Soft Throat is built around her winning entry for the 2015 Structo psalms contest, ‘A Song of Loves’, and expands on its themes of domesticity, grief, and hope. Clothes sleep in the closet. We outlive our dogs. We become our parents. Seymour explores all these themes through meditations on nature, psalm translation, and ekphrastic poems on Rothko, Rossetti, and Song Dynasty silks. Her subtle music recreates the quiet of the everyday while speaking of what lies beneath.

Though I can’t say enough about this collection, I will leave you with one of Seymour’s poems which will do more to recommend it than any words of mine.

— Matthew

Hope Naturally Follows Morning

Our bedroom is an enclave—slipshod thunder,
a parade of brave raindrops on the pane.

Plenty of bothers these days—the tiptoed silk of a relative dying,
quick tracks of a new occupation, lonely’s lullaby.

Yesterday, at the public pool, the summer felt long enough: sun, blue, kids—all of it.
Your kiss was grape-fresh.

After, when we painted a brush caddy at the pottery shop,
a childness took over—messy, thick heart on the bottom.

About his big brother in the hospital, my dad said, I don’t want it.
I pictured a little boy lost in the woods.

As you drape your cool arm on my side,
I think of the loose spaniel I returned home, his one shredded paw,

the way that weather has its own story of misunderstanding:
lightning grabs the mountain like a soft apricot in summer.